Prof. Dr. Gregor Schöner will be giving a keynote talk at CogSci2024 with the title "How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations".  The abstract of the talk can be found below.

Human thinking and acting is generated autonomously, not primarily in reaction to external stimuli. How the neural networks of the brain might autonomously drive the underlying cognitive and behavioral processes is not well understood. Dynamic Field Theory postulates that stable activation patterns emerge from the dynamics of neural populations dominated by internal recurrent connectivity (interaction). The instantiation of stable states and their subsequent destruction in dynamic instabilities leads to the sequences of processing steps on which all thinking and acting is based. We show how cognitive operations can be flexibly employed through binding and coordinate transforms. We outline and demonstrate neural dynamic architectures that visually search for objects to perceptually ground descriptive and enact imperative nested phrases. We illustrate how these architectures may build mental maps that support reasoning and perform analogical structure-mapping.